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Computer Generated

May 07, 2018

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Remember the films Tron, Alien, Terminator and – who could forget - Star Wars? These films revolutionized film making technology using Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) and the movies would never to be the same again. As a matter of fact, when Tron (not an especially good movie, but a revolution in technology) was introduced to Disney Studios many of the animators refused to work on it; they feared this would lead to the loss of their jobs. Meanwhile it took another twenty years before Disney closed their hand drawn studios. The same could be said about Star Wars, which was crude and cartoonish by today’s standards. Then along came Director James Cameron’s Alien, Terminator and the classic Terminator 2: Judgement Day which the American Film Institute named one of the best 100 films of all time.

The special effects in Terminator 2: Judgement Day were mind blowing. They included several breakthroughs in CGI, incorporating natural human motion for the first time in a computer generated main character. To this day it is still a visual phenomenon. The movie was very compelling, however the film’s special effects were considered cheating and The Academy would not allow them to be a candidate for the Oscar for Best Special Effects. All this was powered by 35 computer scientists and technicians, ten months and 5 million dollars. Today, even movies with the least special effects require an army and a budget to match to live up to the new standards. The technological power used to make the latest CGI Feature, The Black Panther, included 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores with 104 terabytes of RAM, a staff of 500 hundred and a 20 million dollar budget. Wow!